Sunday, December 9, 2007

Frode Gjerstad - Sound Sight (Ayler, 2007) ***½

Frode Gjerstad is one of the leading sax players in Norway, fond of the trio or quartet format, and always in for the long haul, with tracks as long as one hour (on "Ultima"). On this album, with Wilber Morris on bass and Rashid Bakr on drums, there are three tracks, two close to 30 minutes and one of 5 minutes. Gjerstad is someone who needs time to bring his music to its full potential, not in the sense of Coltrane, who needed time to create magnificent expansive broad visions, but rather in a nervous, in-the-moment kind of way, knitting close notes around the center of his tune, focusing on the raw intensity of the music. Halfway the first track, the energetic power diminishes, for some slow but creative interaction with Morris on arco. The short middle track brings an interesting sensitive mutual exploration, but with Wilber Morris leading the music. The third piece goes on in the same vein, but not for long, because the energy and the nervousness start building up again, with an impressive Rashid Bakr, pushing the other players forward, and again, as in the first piece, about halfway the track, the whole thing collapses again into itself, and Morris starts playing arco with Gjerstad producing hesitant, plaintive sounds over the bass, resulting in some of the finest moments on the album. It's good that Ayler released this live performance from 1997 on CD, and it's nice addition for those interested in Gjerstad's music. For those who don't know him, I would recommend to listen to "Through The Woods" or "The Other Side" first.

You can download from Ayler records, but also from iTunes and Allaboutjazz.

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ALBUMS OF THE MONTH

Cory Wright Outfit: Apples + Oranges

ALBUMS OF THE MONTH

Lotte Anker & Jakob Riis - Squid Police

What I appreciate in music & how to evaluate it for others

Here are some criteria which I find very important, and true, there may be overlap between them all, but they still have their specific shades and colors of value, and there may be other criteria to add.

1. AUTHENTIC : the emotions have to be real, genuine and truthful, the prime objective should be to create good music for the sake of the music itself (not in order to sell, or to show off, or any other thing ...). That's why I like improvized music, because the link between emotion, musician, sound and listener is to be found in its purest form. It's your immediate emotion you're transmitting, not someone else's. Paradoxically enough, this also includes "absence of self", as a prerequisite for true interplay, listening skills and communion between band members.

2. ADVENTUROUS : the artist/band should be looking for new ways to express what they feel and have to communicate. What's the point for the listener to hear the same kind of approach as others have tried. The surprise element, the creativity, the musical vision are part of the adventure. As a listener I want to be taken along, and explore new musical horizons.

3. ACCURATE : when you hear the sounds, you must have a reaction of "Yes, that's it!", as the sublime translation of feelings through skills and mastery of the instrument, the total sound created by a band or the newly created musical language. The sound, or just obtaining that single note which encapsulates it all, yes, then you know you've transmitted something as a musician, that you've received something as a listener, that you share something. Doing that requires accuracy and concentration.

4. ARTISTIC : by that I mean the more cerebral aspect of music. There is some concept behind it, which leads to structure, balance, length, interplay, selection of instruments, of musicians, of new approaches. This does not go against improvisation, quite on the contrary : great improvised music is all about artistic vision, clever group interaction.

5. ATTENTION-GRABBING : though music can and should require an effort from the listener, it should also include a factor of entertainment, in the sense of keeping the attention going, of being captivating. Lots of music, and especially during long soloing, contains the risk of losing the listener somewhere along the way, even if the musicians themselves are very intensively busy with interesting things. There is of course lots of music which does not take the listener into account at all...

That's my "quintuple A" internal rating system. The stars I usually give in my scoring system are not only not very accurate, they're also not sufficiently discerning. Maybe I should give stars for each of the five criteria listed above. I think the five criteria also include what in Arabic is called "tarab" : appealing to mind, body and soul alike, as far as I understood this from the liner notes from Rabih Abou-Khalil's album with the same name. I specifically did not include the qualifier "beautiful" in the list, because that's even more subjective than the ones already there, and furthermore, I did not find a good synonym for it which starts with an "a" ...